Online Casinos in China

Online gambling is illegal in China, even small bets

A large offshore market of online casinos, live dealer tables, sportsbooks and esports books serves Chinese players in Simplified Chinese, with bets from $0.01 to $500, while the state sports lottery sells football and basketball betting at physical shops only. Online gambling is illegal for everyone in mainland China, and money lost on offshore sites cannot be recovered⁴.

The rules reach beyond China's borders. For Chinese citizens, gambling abroad, gambling online, and even providing funds or technical support for gambling operations all violate Chinese law⁵. Opening a casino overseas with Chinese citizens as the primary customers is likewise illegal⁶. These rules apply to citizens wherever they are; visitors and foreign residents in China are also covered by the domestic ban while on the mainland.

Two practical points matter more than the legal theory:

• The state lottery authorities have never authorized any website, app or mini program to sell lottery tickets, so anything sold online under a lottery brand is illegal⁷.
• Money you lose on offshore gambling sites is not protected by Chinese law, and there is no way to recover it through the courts⁴. If a site takes your deposit and disappears, you have no recourse.

Online poker is in the same position. There are no Chinese-owned or operated poker sites, and the illegality of online gambling has made online poker essentially dead in the country⁸. For the full picture on that, see online poker in China.

The legal alternative: sports lottery shops, not websites

What China does offer legally is the state sports lottery, and it is a real, substantial product. You can bet on football and basketball results, with fixed-odds games, parlays and prize caps set out in official rules. The catch is the channel: the state has never approved any institution or individual to sell lottery over the internet, and offline lottery stores are the only legal place to buy³. Physical China Sports Lottery shops are the only regular and legal purchase channel, and the paper ticket is the only valid redemption voucher⁹. Selling or buying tickets online is explicitly prohibited¹⁰.

The games themselves are worth knowing about:

The basketball game caps a single ticket at CNY 20,000 staked¹².

If you want to bet on sport legally while in China, this is the route. You can read more in sports betting in China and jingcai sports lottery betting, and the wider lottery range is covered in the China lottery.

What offshore online casinos offer

Despite the ban, a large offshore market exists and is built for Chinese players. Court cases show how it works: the Dafa 888 gambling site ran entirely in Simplified Chinese and required gamblers to remit funds from bank cards inside China¹. Another operation, the Ledu gambling website, recruited mainland Chinese citizens as members¹³. In other words, these are not sites that merely tolerate Chinese players; some are designed around them.

A typical offshore casino site today offers a wide spread of products. Live Casino House, for example, runs live casino tables, slots, roulette, lottery, sports, fish shooting, arcade games and virtual games, with deposits and withdrawals available 24 hours¹⁴. Live dealer games are hosted by real human dealers, played in real time with HD streaming, covering roulette, blackjack, baccarat and live game shows¹⁵. A Japanese police survey of online casino sites found the same pattern across the industry: slot games, table games like roulette, blackjack and baccarat, live casino, poker, and sports betting on soccer, horse racing and esports¹⁶.

Sportsbooks attached to these casinos are equally broad:

Crypto casinos are a growing part of this market, taking deposits in cryptocurrency rather than through bank cards, which matters in China because domestic card transfers to gambling sites are blocked and traceable. For payments generally, see gambling payments in China.

Reviews of individual operators, including Stake, BCGame, BitStarz and Dafabet, cover what each one offers in detail.

Esports betting: titles, bet types and odds

Esports is the fastest-growing corner of the offshore market for Chinese players, partly because it is watched and played so widely in Asia. The title list is long:

The bet types go well beyond picking a match winner. On the major titles you can bet on total kills, map winners, and live props like first blood²². That means during a best-of-three in Dota 2 or CS2 you can bet on each map as it starts, on how many kills a team will rack up, or on which side draws first blood, with odds moving in play.

Typical odds ranges give you a sense of the prices²:

In plain terms, favorites on mobile titles pay less, and League of Legends markets include both heavy favorites and long shots.

Esports bet limits: from $1 to $500+

Entry costs on esports betting are low. Minimum bets start at $1, with maximums of $500 or more across major global tournaments²². The same figures appear in CoinPoker's Japanese-language material, which quotes bets from $1 up to over $500 at major world tournaments for League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant and CS2²³.

Some crypto sites go lower still:

• Coins.Game lists a minimum bet of $0.01²⁴
• Natural8's casino table games start from $0.10²⁵

So the range across the market runs from a cent to several hundred dollars per bet, depending on the site and the market.

For comparison, the legal state lottery games inside China work on a different scale: a CNY 2 minimum stake on football win-draw-loss¹¹, up to CNY 20,000 on a single basketball ticket¹². Esports betting at offshore books sits somewhere in between on stakes, but with no prize cap and no legal protection.

Sites that accept Chinese players

A number of offshore operators openly accept players from China. Sites listed as accepting Chinese players include Betandyou, Bitstarz and Dafabet²⁶. These are foreign-licensed operations; none of them is legal to use from within mainland China, whatever their own terms say. Reviews of BitStarz and Dafabet cover their games, licenses and payment options.

One distinction worth knowing: foreigners in China can play in legal brick-and-mortar clubs, such as poker clubs in Beijing or Sanya, by registering with a passport, though payouts there are in points or tickets rather than cash⁸. That legal option does not extend to any online site. For the land-based side of things, see casinos in China and gambling in China as a visitor.